Grey morning beach math haibun

Blond sand blows low and hard over ankles, driftwood and half-buried trash. These feathers, eddies and vortices have been perfectly modelled in our wind tunnels and supercomputers. Simpler now, elevation, the heft in an old rubber ball, angle of release, initial velocity, all describe that perfect parabola, a quadratic which the dog knows as well as Galileo.

Some cyclone out in the Pacific spun up in predictable ways across a thousand square miles of warm ocean drives long-period waves up over the continental shelf to create turquoise cylinders that hang for a moment and longer as the off-shore blows extravagant combs high into the air. A lone surfer considers Plato’s conic sections, hydrodynamics and chaotic flow as he imagines a green roaring way closing over. A calculus of gulls stays to the last, then wings as one onto the wind contemptuous of the collie’s low-shouldered guile.

All this and much more entirely calculable until the early sun, travelling the ocean in columns of glory – opens for a moment and asks my soul

Sleepless, I listen to the first fall of leaves
on my summer garden.

Image: The Flammarion woodcut c/- Wikimedia. A haibun written for Dverse where Bjorn is hosting and asks us to think about ‘grey’.

The first stanza had me in rapture. I read it over and over. And again. I felt every word, convinced I’d experienced the same thing numerous times. I was cast adrift in the second stanza, but no worries; I’m often clueless. Often adrift. I think poets are expected to do that adrifting stuff. ps: My tulips are about to bloom. Spring is coming, which means your autumn is nipping at your toes soon. How easily the table turns…